My thinking in using task as the top level task runner was that we might have services other than node, or want to run docker containers, etc. make is definitely an option there, i just find the syntax super oldschool and error prone. Shell scripts have the same drawbacks as make, anything a bit more complicated gets difficult to maintain in my view.

If we use nix, installing the dependencies is done by the dev shell, so i personally don't think its that much of an issue, but i understand if it's not for you.

Maybe we throw out task, replace it with node, but keep process-compose? I find it very handy how it lets me see the individual logs, restart individual services etc. Or maybe the node runners have similar functions?

@eulervoid I prefer a solution that doesnt require an additional install unless it's light and node-based as in it uses the same tooling we use everywhere. i think there's probably an easy way to set up process-compose for your local environment which is outside of version control.

even pm2 feels like overkill to me because it has all kinds of features for longer running processes and sometimes makes it difficult for ai agents to debug and interact with the testing environment. i think grepping or filtering for individual service logs is quite trivial if we set it up nice. concurrently seems quite good for that in terms of features but also open just to bash or make or everything in the scripts part in the root package.json

Ok, lets close this PR and i will add my process-compose.yml to gitignore.

@eulervoid I quickly vibecoded the solution with concurrently and a simple package.json

i think it fulfills the purpose at least for my use cases and is a bit more lightweight considering everything is already node.

{
  "name": "pollinations-monorepo",
  "private": true,
  "scripts": {
    "install:all": "npm install --prefix enter.pollinations.ai && npm install --prefix text.pollinations.ai && npm install --prefix image.pollinations.ai",
    "dev": "concurrently --kill-others-on-fail --prefix '[{name}]' --names 'enter,text,image' -c 'auto' 'npm run dev --prefix enter.pollinations.ai' 'npm run dev --prefix text.pollinations.ai' 'npm run dev --prefix image.pollinations.ai'",
    "dev:enter": "npm run dev --prefix enter.pollinations.ai",
    "dev:text": "npm run dev --prefix text.pollinations.ai",
    "dev:image": "npm run dev --prefix image.pollinations.ai"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "concurrently": "^9.1.0"
  }
}

thats the root package.json now. check if you think its ok. i think concurrently also has ways of dynamically hiding / unhiding specific services

@claude can you look at how we can start the enter service in a way it is connecting the local running services? create an env for it? override the variaboes?
respond concisely

Claude finished @voodoohop's task —— View job

Solution for enter service local development

• Read enter service configuration
• Identify service URL configuration
• Provide solution for local development

Service URLs are configured in wrangler.toml:

• Lines 40-41: IMAGE_SERVICE_URL and TEXT_SERVICE_URL
• env.local section (lines 68-69) already has localhost URLs configured

To connect enter to local services:

1. Use the --env local flag:

   npm run dev -- --env local

   This reads env.local.vars which already has:

   • IMAGE_SERVICE_URL = "http://localhost:16384"
   • TEXT_SERVICE_URL = "http://localhost:16385"

2. Or create .dev.vars file in enter.pollinations.ai/:

   IMAGE_SERVICE_URL=http://localhost:16384
   TEXT_SERVICE_URL=http://localhost:16385

3. Update root package.json dev script:

   "dev:enter": "npm run dev --prefix enter.pollinations.ai -- --env local"

Port mapping:

• enter: 3000 (wrangler.toml line 7)
• text: 16385 (startServer.js)
• image: 16384 (src/index.ts)

--- • PR Branch